Combining Social Service and Healthcare as the First Country in the World : Exploring the Impacts on Information Systems

Abstract

The Finnish government has decided to implement a reform in the social and healthcare system by combining the two in the future. There are several drivers for this change that have been identified. Large number of information systems that are not interoperable, challenges in data management and isolated service offering are the most significant ones. In the government’s strategy for the future the digitalisation will provide tools to solve these challenges. In this paper the landscape is outlined and the architecture choices are discussed. The enterprise architecture is applied for the largest county comprising of over 1900 social service and healthcare related information systems. The target is to design one joint system with maximum of 300 supporting information systems resulting in 3 B EUR savings.